PATN Week 8 – The Race to the Fortress of Airwolf by Al “Turbo” Unser, Jr

This week, I started my twitch stream on the channel with the same name as my article, Play All The Nintendo! I haven’t figured out exactly when I’ll be streaming games, but likely it will be in the evenings during the week. The endeavor has been fraught with technical issues, of course, but that comes to be expected. I got a new webcam, a friend of mine lovingly supplied art and know-how to get me started, and I found a good way to split the video signal into a capture device and into my TV, so that the retro experience for me isn’t marred in any way. There was an interesting mix of games this week, from space shooters to racing games, but of course there had to be at least one clunker, and that was in the form of, you guessed it, a tv show tie-in game. Let’s start with the best of the 3:

The first game I was able to load up (bad file headers continue to be an issue) was Air Fortress, released in 1989 in America, but in 1987, back in Japan. This game takes the classic SHMUP genre and tweaks it a bit by adding platforming sections. The game felt a little too easy, which is a far cry from games I’ve played recently like Abadox, which was unrelenting in its punishment of the player. But as the game progressed, it ramped up quite subtly and with care, and it was obvious to me that some attention was paid to this experience. You are Hal, (much like Hudson from Hudson Soft) which is a ommage to Hal Laboratory, the developer. First up, you are treated to a long back story, (which has been unusual up this point in my playthroughs) and while the overall plot isn’t much to shake a stick at, it’s still admirable they gave it a shot at all. The idea is that you have to find all the Air Fortresses, land on them, and destroy them from the inside and then get out before everything explodes. This is where it gets interesting: this section to each of the fortresses’ that actually gives the game a surprising amount of tension and depth. The music becomes Metroid quiet, and you are tasked with finding your ship so you can fly out, but that can be a bit of a struggle to find since you have to backtrack. Not only this, but the screen begins to shake, lights begin to dim and there’s an oddly cinematic feel to what’s happening that I haven’t really seen in any NES game so far. If you take too long to find your ship, the shaking and sound increases in fervor until the screen goes brilliant white: game over. I found my heart start to race and a smile creep into my lips as the tensions rose. A brilliant moment of panic, as there are no enemies and nothing else that could kill you but that ticking time bomb with no countdown clock. I put the game away, thinking it was alright, maybe not great. The next time I started it back up, a strange thing started to happen. I started really getting into it. Started to feel a bond with my lonely orange astronaut as he sought to destroy every Air Fortress himself. The music was a touch shy of excellent, the graphics were mostly perfunctory: not much flair or excitement in their presentation. Even your main character looked like he rode a tiny orange space shuttle that he was nearly bigger than. I’m sure it was supposed to be some sort of space moped, but it still looked a little strange. Hal traverses the Fortress sporting his very much MMU-inspired (Manned Maneuvering Units, like they use for space walks) pack, which allowed him to float around instead of jumping. The game shifts from “don’t touch anything” and “one shot will kill you” to “you can take multiple hits” and “touching something bad only lowers your energy”. The game has an atmosphere that charmed me. I found myself wanting to play it again when I wasn’t home: a feeling I haven’t experienced with many of the other titles here. A good game all around (and in my opinion, pretty ahead of its time), I wish that it had gained more popularity and perhaps a few sequels, but I’ll take what I can get. Also: in promotion for this game in the US, they actually made a t-shirt and now I want it more than anything. I don’t even know what they look like and yet: Must have. Play it!

Second up was one of those sigh-inducing titles: Airwolf, Yes, here is the tv-show tie-in port of an older game. It was released in 1989, many years after the original arcade hit in 1984. It feels a lot like Top Gun, or at least what I remember Top Gun feeling like (it will be a few years before my article brings me to the “T” section to compare): which was a terrible game. You start off, as so many of these military-type carts do: being given a MISSION BRIEFING, where some generic, mustached General spouts off a briefing in the form of “hey, there are prisoners” “hey you should get them” “hey look a map with x’s” “hey that’s all the intel we got, dude, best of luck, don’t die”, Then you are thrust into what basically runs as an infinite dogfight between objectives. I spent the first couple of lives killing enemies left and right and then mysteriously running out of fuel and realizing I wasn’t moving anywhere on the map. Turns out, my speed was at “0”, which basically meant I was idling and somehow dogfighting F-18’s all in the same moment. Once I figured out that start and select gave me control on my speed, I was then able to move across the map to my target. The forever dogfight still raged on, which I quickly realized was just a lazy obstacle to my ability to get across to the prisoners and air field (which I’m still not entirely sure was mine or theirs or what). Rescuing a prisoner basically turned the game into Choplifter for a moment, with far less control. Every once in a while, I was treated to a special picture of the lady I rescued, all busting out of her top and saying something pithy like “good thing you came, it was getting a little hot in the kitchen”. I’m paraphrasing but you get the gist: fan service for 80s gamers, I suppose. The sound in this is atrocious. They decided to try to emulate the chopper with a noise that really starts to grate on your ears. As the game progressed, nothing much else changed. You went around blowing up planes or towers or what have you and then picking up prisoners. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to finish a mission. I was just flying around trying to survive the onslaught of enemies but couldn’t work out where I needed to go. Since this game wasn’t blessed with an actual pause button, I had to keep flying as I looked up a walk through. A moment later, bam, I was done with mission but missed what in the heck I even did. Turns out, you have to fly to the edge of the map, and then magically you are finished. Yeah, know what? I’m finished too. No thanks. Avoid it!

Finally, I set my sights on the next game: Al Unser Jr’s Turbo Racing, a title released by Data East in 1988. At first, I felt like it was a Pole Position clone, through and through. But, as I played through, it became clear it was a vastly deeper experience. You can shift gears in this game, you have pit stops and points you can distribute to different features of your car. You can customize the colors, you can name your driver. If I had been really into F-1 racing as a kid, I could have seen losing my mind at all the amazing in-depth options afforded here. There are time trials and full on races; multi-laps and multiple tracked cars (at least it comes across that way) and up to 4-player action. Data East took what was basically a pole position clone and expanded it past what I would normally expect for a game released in ’88. That being said, for me the basic racing was still a better experience on Rad Racer, but perhaps it was all the time I spent on that game, and how I was actually used to the mechanics. The graphics were serviceable, though not jaw-dropping. I enjoyed having a choice of different background tracks that could play during a race and the controls were pretty tight, though I could have personally done without shifting gears: I am never one for complexity and since there was no sound for acceleration, it didn’t have the cool factor of hearing the engine roar as you shifted. This game has shown up on many a list for being one of the forefathers of the racing game genre, and I think it mostly lives up to its reputation, if this kinda game is your thing, it’s worth a pick up. Try it!

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But [...]